User names and passwords belonging to more than 8,000 Comcast Internet customers were left exposed on the Web for at least two months. A post by Brad Stone on the Bits blog [NYTimes.com] details the situation, which was exposed by a Comcast customer from Pennsylvania.
Kevin Andreyo, an educational technology specialist in Reading, Pa., and a professor at Wilkes University, came across the list Monday on Scribd, a document-sharing Web site.
Mr. Andreyo was reading a recent article in PC World entitled “People Search Engines: They Know Your Dark Secrets… And Tell Anyone,” when he was inspired to find out what information about him was online. He searched for his own e-mail address on the search engine Pipl.
The list on Scribd was one of four results, and it also included his password, which was a riff on his love for a local sports team. Statistics on Scribd indicated that the list, which was uploaded by someone with the user name vuthanhan2004, had been viewed over 345 times and had been downloaded 27 times.
Stone writes that the list was removed early Monday afternoon.
